『Sustainability In Your Ear』のカバーアート

Sustainability In Your Ear

Sustainability In Your Ear

著者： Mitch Ratcliffe
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概要

 Mitch Ratcliffe interviews activists, authors, entrepreneurs and changemakers working to accelerate the transition to a sustainable, post-carbon society. You have more power to improve the world than you know! Listen in to learn and be inspired to give your best to restoring the climate and regenerating nature.Copyright 2025 Internet Media Strategies Inc. マネジメント・リーダーシップ リーダーシップ 地球科学 生物科学 科学 経済学
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  • Sustainability In Your Ear: Schneider Electric's Steve Wilhite Maps the Renewable Energy Transition

    Sustainability In Your Ear: Schneider Electric's Steve Wilhite Maps the Renewable Energy Transition
    2026/03/30
    The global energy system is changing in two big ways: it is moving from centralized fossil-fuel generation to distributed renewables, and it is becoming more digital in how energy is measured, traded, and optimized. Steve Wilhite, Executive Vice President of Advisory Services at Schneider Electric, works at the intersection of these complementary yet challenging transitions. Schneider supports more than 40% of the Fortune 500 with energy procurement and sustainability strategies, managing over $50 billion in annual energy spending. His experience shows something that pledges and press releases often miss: the biggest challenge for corporate sustainability is not money, technology, or political will. The real issue is the gap between ambition and the ability to deliver. Companies are making Science-Based Targets commitments faster than they are building the infrastructure to meet them. Scope one and two emissions are being managed better, but scope three emissions, which come from a company's supply chain, still present a systems problem that no single company can solve alone. Schneider's zero-carbon supplier program suggests what it takes to close this gap. When the company started its own effort to cut emissions from its top 1,000 suppliers by 50% in five years, all 1,000 signed up within two weeks. However, about 84% of them did not fully understand what they had agreed to. Achieving success meant creating measurement tools, education programs, and action plans to help the whole ecosystem, not just individual companies.

    This critical conversation explores how renewable energy is bought, including the difference between physical and virtual power purchase agreements. Steve also explains why the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) market became more complex as it grew, and why 10% fewer renewable deals closed in 2025 compared to 2024, as tech companies used up available clean energy.He also addresses a key question in clean energy: is AI helping the environment overall, or do its energy needs still outweigh its efficiency benefits? Schneider processes over a million energy invoices each month, and about 50,000 of them had issues that took 10 to 15 business days to resolve. Now, a team of AI systems can handle these in seconds. Accurate energy consumption and billing data directly affect emissions reporting, energy efficiency, and money-saving market decisions. He describes Schnieder's approach as "frugal AI": using the right-sized models for each task, running them on clean energy, and choosing simple solutions over complex ones. Looking ahead, electrification is building a global digital energy network in which every meter and adjustment contributes to a new system independent of central plants. As intelligence spreads, power can shift to consumers, communities, and businesses. Schneider is enabling this shift by building a mesh grid in which each point both produces and consumes energy, coordinated by AI. These changes fundamentally reshape the global energy landscape. The central question: will we intentionally build this new, distributed system, or will we repeat centralized patterns digitally?

    To learn more about Schneider Electric's sustainability efforts, visit se.com.
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    54 分
  • Sustainability In Your Ear: Jasper Steinhausen on Making Sustainability Profitable

    Sustainability In Your Ear: Jasper Steinhausen on Making Sustainability Profitable
    2026/03/23
    Most business leaders believe sustainability costs money. They’re wrong. The proof is sitting right under their noses, bleeding out quietly as waste, excess heat, and byproducts every day the factory runs. Danish manufacturing data shows that more than 20% of raw materials purchased by the average company never reach a finished product. In a sector where resource costs account for more than 50% of total operating expenses — compared to less than 25% for salaries — that’s not a compliance problem or a branding challenge. It’s a structural, strategic failure that most business leaders have never been trained to see. Jasper Steinhausen spent two decades watching that failure play out across more than 100 companies in the Nordic countries. He came to sustainability not from the environmental side, but from marketing, where the core lesson was that people act on what they care about, not on what you think they should care about. When he started connecting the dots between resource-flow analysis and business strategy, the conversation changed. Leaders who tuned out every sustainability pitch suddenly leaned in when the frame was cost reduction, supply chain resilience, and competitive advantage. The “green” problem turned out to be a business problem in disguise — and a solvable one. That reframing is in his book, Making Sustainability Profitable: A Leader’s Guide to Growing a Thriving Business That Makes the World a Better Place. A free digital copy of the book is available at freebook.scoreapp.com — Jasper recommends starting with Chapter Three.The argument Jasper makes is structural. Today’s business leaders have been trained rigorously in managing time and money, but almost never in managing material flows, even though materials dwarf payroll in the cost structure of most manufacturing companies. The result is a generation of leaders who are leaving more than half their cost base strategically unmanaged. The narrative problem compounds the structural one. When every leader wakes up believing sustainability is a cost, a constraint, and a compromise, they never get to the question of whether it might be something else. Jasper's idea, which he posts about on LinkedIn and tests with clients ranging from small manufacturers to government advisory roles, is that the narrative is the first hurdle. The mental transformation has to precede the business transformation. Companies that clear that hurdle and start treating sustainability as an innovation platform consistently find themselves with a layer of competitive advantage their rivals haven’t even thought to open.Our conversation also covers the greenwashing trap, and how to avoid it by going around it entirely. The problem with leading on sustainability as a marketing message, Jasper argues, is that it inverts the logic. The job isn’t to convince customers to care about the planet. It’s to identify the problem they’re already trying to solve and deliver a better solution. Once that happens to be more sustainable because sustainability, done right, produces better outcomes. “Impact follows perceived value,” he says. A water company with a genuinely pure, chemical-free source doesn’t lead with environmental stewardship. It leads with safer drinking water for your kids. The sustainability isn’t hidden — it’s structural. It’s why the product delivers what it promises. Communicating it means doing what you say, saying what you do, and backing every claim with data and a visible roadmap. That’s not a compromise. That’s the only version of sustainability communication that survives contact with a skeptical market.You can learn more about Jasper’s work at bwimpact.com and connect with him on LinkedIn.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
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    55 分
  • Sustainability In Your Ear: The XPRIZE Wildfire Competition Heats Up

    Sustainability In Your Ear: The XPRIZE Wildfire Competition Heats Up
    2026/03/16
    Every wildfire starts small. The problem is that by the time most are detected, minutes have already passed and, under increasingly common conditions driven by a warming climate, a fire can grow beyond any tanker truck's capacity to contain. The gap between ignition and coordinated response currently averages around 40 minutes. Firefighters have long understood the math: a spoonful of water in the first second, a bucket in the first minute, a truckload in the first hour. The XPRIZE Wildfire competition is an $11 million global effort to prove that autonomous systems, including AI-enabled drones, ground-based sensor networks, and space-based detection platforms, can collapse that window to 10 minutes. Our guest is Andrea Santy, who leads the program. She came to XPRIZE after nearly two decades at the World Wildlife Fund, where she watched conservation projects fall to wildfire. That experience sharpened her understanding of the stakes: wildfires are now the leading driver of deforestation globally, having surpassed agriculture. In places like the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and parts of tropical East Asia, a single fire can eliminate species found nowhere else on Earth. In cities, it can destroy entire neighborhoods in hours. On January 7, 2025, Santa Ana winds drove flames through Pacific Palisades and Altadena, destroying more than 16,000 structures, killing 30 people, displacing 180,000 residents, and generating between $76 billion and $130 billion in total economic losses from a single event. Annual U.S. wildfire costs, when healthcare, lost productivity, ecosystem damage, and rebuilding are included, are estimated between $394 billion and $893 billion. XPRIZE announced the five autonomous wildfire response finalists just over a year after the LA fires: Anduril, deploying its Lattice AI platform with autonomous fire sentry towers and Ghost X drones; Dryad, running solar-powered mesh sensor networks that detect fires at the smoldering stage; Fire Swarm Solutions, coordinating heavy-lift drone swarms that can deliver 100 gallons of water autonomously; Data Blanket, building rapidly deployable drone swarms for real-time perimeter mapping and suppression; and Wildfire Quest, a team of high school students from Valley Christian High School in San Jose who used multi-sensor triangulation to locate fires that can't be seen from monitoring positions, solving the literal over-the-hill problem that any fire detection system faces.The conversation covers what the finalists demonstrated during semi-final trials at 40-mile-per-hour winds, why the decoy fire requirement — distinguishing a wildfire from a barbecue, a pile burn, or a flapping tarp — is one of the hardest AI classification problems in the competition, and how autonomous systems would integrate with existing incident command structures. Santy is direct about where progress is lagging: the testing is ahead of the regulations. Autonomous drones operating beyond visual line of sight and coordinating with manned aircraft in active fire emergencies require FAA frameworks that don't yet exist at the necessary scale. There's also the deeper ecological tension — the growing scientific consensus that many fire-adapted landscapes need more fire, not less, and that indigenous fire stewardship practices developed over millennia have a place alongside autonomous suppression technology. One XPRIZE finalist is already working with an indigenous community in Canada to pilot their heavy-lift drone system in a remote area where that community is exploring how the technology fits their land management approach. Meanwhile, the Trump administration's FY 2026 budget proposes eliminating Forest Service state fire capacity grants, cutting vegetation and watershed management programs by 30%, and zeroing out $300 million in forest research funding — maintaining suppression spending while gutting the prevention and detection infrastructure that could reduce what there is to suppress. The engineering, Santy says, has arrived. Whether the institutions can move at the speed the crisis demands is the harder question.You can learn more about XPRIZE Wildfire and follow the finalists at xprize.org/competitions/wildfire.
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    40 分
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